Bethany Switch
BETHANY SWITCH
In 1960s Bethany Switch, Texas, a woman's voice belongs to the church, the family, and the town - in that order. It does not belong to her.
Mina Lovelace is twenty-nine, and everybody in Bethany Switch says it like it's a complete sentence.
She works. She keeps the house. She sings on Sundays in a way that makes other people feel righteous. Hidden under her bed, in a suitcase that belonged to her mother, is a fiddle she isn't supposed to have and music she isn't supposed to want - hymns she has quietly, carefully taken apart and made into something else. Something that sounds like her.
When a stranger appears at her back door one summer morning with a battered fiddle case and word of a Saturday hall just outside Tyler, Mina has to decide what kind of woman she is going to be. Not the kind the town has been rehearsing. The other kind.
Bethany Switch is a novel about music as resistance, silence as survival, and the long, difficult distance between the life you were handed and the one that belongs to you. Set against the heat and cicadas and hard-edged grace of East Texas, it is the story of a woman learning - slowly, at great cost, and without apology - to sing like she means it.
Perfect for readers of Delia Owens' Where the Crawdads Sing, Ron Rash's Serena, and Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge - literary Southern fiction with a quiet, determined heart.
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